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Flea Market Mapping

For the past year, I’ve been collecting old maps of Oakland, CA and georectifying them using a suite of open source tools. I’ll show how online repositories such as the Online Archive Of California and physical venues such as Antiques By The Bay can be a useful source of historical real estate, rail, and road maps.

Such maps can shed light on modern geography when placed in counterpoint to the state of art in modern maps from Google or Microsoft. I’ll talk about the best available open source methods to georectify, tile, and publish these resources, and show web-based presentations that help to explain physical geography and change over time. I’ll also show how historical cartography can influence the direction of modern online cartography and design.

This talk will be an extension of a year of experimentation in historical maps as well as related work from Stamen Design:

Michal has been building for the web since 1995, specializing in data design and publishing for a diverse range of clients and numerous public, technical research projects and active open source codebases. He’s a Polish National and holds a degree in Cognitive Science from UC Berkeley. He maintains an active weblog at mike.teczno.com, and likes to talk in front of groups.

Comments

Michal did a good job. I was sort of surprised he didn’t mention any sort of affiliation with the National Archives, Library of Congress, or other institutions as far as seeking economies.

Mohsin Ali

05/21/2009 6:45am PDT

I really enjoyed this talk! They way map data can be shown to use at varying degrees through time is an amazing concept! Something that I’m working on similarly but with archived photos based on your location. en.oreilly.com/where2009/pu...

Adam DuVander

05/21/2009 6:31am PDT

There’s a lot more we can do in determining map visualization. Looking to the past is a good place to learn and Michal’s use of old maps in a new way is inspiring.